But this was no multicultural Garden of Eden. Even then considerations of social class rather than egalitarianism were what made some Indian women marry the company men, in much the same way as the Mughals had arranged dynastic marriages. And no amount of goodwill could erase the fact that a relatively small group of men had invaded India and were bleeding everyone in it, through heavy financial tolls extracted by a process that was often forcible, violent, and destructive. Moreover, the seeds of the darker sort of Orientalism were sown even now. The early scholars of Hinduism licked their chops at images of Hindu cruelty; one of the earliest European books about India, Abraham Roger’s The Open Door, published in Leiden in 1651 and more widely disseminated in the French translation of 1670, selected for its few illustrations images of Hindus swinging from hooks and the Juggernaut rolling over Hindu bodies. (Euro-American writers called all sorts of people Juggernauts, including the pope, Napoleon, and Mr. Hyde [the worse half of Dr. Jekyll].) Already tales of madness, out-of-control multiplicity, and brutal sexuality were being nurtured, now simply out of prurience but eventually to justify colonial interventions.
Moreover, however fine that first fancy may or may not have been, it was quickly polluted. A number of factors eroded the genuine goodwill of most of the British in India. Some of the changes in the British attitude to India and Indians were gradual, arising in either England (such as racism15) or India (such as resentment). Partly in response to changes in the concept of family and the availability of better living conditions in India, the men brought their women over from England; this not only dampened (though it did not extinguish) the fires of romances between Englishmen and Indian women, but also banished the formerly live-in servants to separate buildings, now that memsahibs (as the wives of sahibs were called) were running the houses. The men withdrew from Indian life; “the club closed its doors to Indians; and the vicar often came to tea.”16 There were also more white women and children there to justify the erection of barriers against unhealthy native influences and to claim to have been massacred when the massacres began. Going native had lost its charm.
The estrangement between rulers and ruled had begun already in the eighteenth century. Eventually, by the early twentieth century, it would have reached that point where the British could speak to Indians only to order them about. In E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924), the wife of the petty bureaucrat in charge of a particular British colony attempts to learn Urdu: “She had learnt the lingo, but only to speak to her servants, so she knew none of the politer forms and of the verbs only the imperative mood.”17 This did not happen only in novels. In India in 1963, I heard a very similar story from Lady Penelope Chetwode, who had grown up in India when her father (Field Marshal Sir Philip Chetwode) was commander in chief there, from 1930 to 1935 (just a decade after the publication of Forster’s novel), and had now returned to India to learn Hindi, among other things. When I asked her, “But why are you only learning Hindi now? Didn’t you learn it years ago, when you lived in India?” she replied, deadpan, “Yes, of course. But we only learned the imperatives of all the verbs!”
Anti-British feeling even in the late eighteenth century was strong enough to spawn, and fuel, a number of anti-British myths. The weavers were caught between the rapacity of the Indian agents who served as middlemen and the Englishmen for whom they worked. The British treated the weavers in Bengal so cruelly18 that they were widely believed, apparently on no evidence, to have cut off the weavers’ thumbs,jx or, on the basis of one piece of dubious evidence, to have so persecuted the winders of silk that they cut off their own thumbs in protest.19 Weavers’ thumbs were not literally cut off, but the myth arose because “worse than that happened to them and to Bengal.”20 The myth of the weavers’ thumbs may also have grown out of the famous Mahabharata story of the low-caste archer Ekalavya, forced to cut off his right thumb.
Changes in British-Indian relations were precipitated, in part, by a series of violent and dramatic events, reaching a climax in the Rebellion of 1857-1858. But there had been distant early warnings a century before that.
THE BLACK HOLE
One of the great British icons of the historical mythology of the Raj is the Black Hole of Calcutta. To begin with, the British themselves built the Black Hole, the detention cell and barracks’ punishment cell of their fort in Calcutta (a city founded by the British, later renamed Kolkata), and that prison was already known by that epithet before the incident in question. But it entered British mythology in 1756, when the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daula, attacked Calcutta and Fort William and the British withdrew in panic to their ships, leaving Siraj in charge of the city, which included a number (a much-disputed number) of European men, women, and children who had failed to get away. Siraj put them, unharmed and apparently intending them no harm, into the Black Hole, from which, next morning, twenty-three (a number that is not much disputed) emerged alive, dehydration and suffocation having killed the rest, perhaps another fifty (this is the disputed number). Of course, many more died every day of starvation in India as a result of British policies (or indifference), but since they weren’t British, and slow starvation doesn’t (unfortunately) make for lurid headlines, those Indian deaths were not a useful political myth for the British. The news of the Black Hole deaths, however, set off a series of self-righteous British reprisals, as each side kept responding to alleged atrocities of the other, upping the ante, a pattern that was to be repeated many times in India, right through the Partition riots. The Black Hole became a rallying call used to justify a number of British aggressions, beginning with Clive’s recapture of Calcuttain 1757 and, by 1765, the British conquest of the rest of Bengal. Near the end of that conquest, in 1764, twenty-four of the company’s Indian sepoys had refused orders and been sadistically executed: They were strapped to cannons by their arms, their bellies against the mouths of the guns, which were then fired, “in front of their quaking colleagues.”jy Clive made about £400,000 sterling on the conquest of Bengal, and his pals made more than £1,250,000.21 This is a particularly ugly chapter in the history of the Raj.
Over the next century, taxes levied on the company’s “subjects” were consistently increased. Like the Mughals, the British collected the tax on pilgrimages to shrines like the Jagannatha temple and so did not interfere with them. But their main taxes were often paid in crops, and they destroyed the surplus that was an essential buffer when the monsoon failed. The money from taxes became the principal source of the Company’s income and so the mainstay of what was called the Pax Britannia (British Peace). But as John Keay remarks, “In the experience of most Indians Pax Britannia meant mainly ‘Tax Britannica.’ ”22 The merchant in Kipling’s Kim says, “The Government has brought on us many taxes, but it gives us one good thing—the te-rain that joins friends and unites the anxious. A wonderful matter is the te-rain,”23 and the British boasted that they had given India the great gift of “trains and drains.” This argument (later echoed in the “Hitler built the Autobahn and Mussolini made the trains run on time” justification for crimes against humanity) ignored the deep distrust that many Hindus had of both trains and telegraphs. In response, Indians would retort that the main drain was the drain of resources from India to England, 24 which, exacerbated by stockpiling, corrupt distribution, and hoarding by the British, led to widespread famines. This was a Black Hole in the astronomical sense, a negative space into which the riches and welfare of the Indian people vanished without a trace.
Famine and plague (which raged during this period), as always, affected religion. The widespread economic devastation may well account for the increase, at this time, of goddess worship, which generally flourishes during epidemics. When two years of failed monsoon led to the famine of 1750 to 1755, in which a third of the population of Bengal, some ten million people, died, there was a surge in the worship of the goddess Kali in her aspect of Annapurna (“Full of Food).25 Hard times give rise to hard deities. And it was religion that really soured the Raj.
AND THE MISSIONARIES
As long as it was just a matter of graft and the lust for power, the British treated the people they robbed as human beings. It was religion that made them treat them like devils. At first the East India Company had adamantly excluded all Christian missionary activity from its territories, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of what was at stake in the religious debatejz and a consciousness of the disadvantages of unnecessarily antagonizing its Indian subjects. In 1793, Charles Cornwallis (Governor-General from 1786 to 1793) made a pact promising not to interfere with the religions of the people of India. The Company continued the patronage accorded by indigenous rulers to many Hindu temples and forbade its Indian troops to embrace Christianity. But when the Company’s charter was renewed in 1813, the growing evangelical conscience in England forced it to allow Christian missions to operate in India. The evangelical Clapham Sect in London converted a Governor-General (Sir John Shore, 1793- 1798) and a leading Company director and put pressure on the government in Westminster.26
Thus the second wave began. In contrast with the conservatives and Orientalists of the first wave, this batch of British might be labeled evangelicals and opportunists, who regarded India as a land of heathens and idolaters in desperate need of being missionized. They met with some degree of success. Tribals converted to Christianity in large numbers because they associated the value system of the Christian missionaries with the power of the British.27 Some low-caste Hindus converted to avoid the stigma of being Pariahs, though the missionaries, respecting caste, as all religions in India always did, boasted of the number of their Brahmin converts. Other low-caste Hindus converted just for the relief of the soup kitchens, which made upper-caste Hindus call them rice Christians. Hindus of all castes converted as a result of their involvement in government and administration, intermarriage, and change of heart.
Both Hindus and Muslims blamed the government for allowing the missionariesfree rein.28 The missionaries influenced the government to intervene in Hindu matters; under James Dalhousie (Governor-General from 1847 to 1856), the government passed laws making it possible for Hindu widows to remarry, Hindu converts to Christianity to retain inheritance rights (which, according to Hindu law, they would have lost when they ceased to be Hindus), and castes to mingle in railroad carriages.29 Evangelical officers favored Christian sepoys, and meddling, arrogant missionaries taught the young Indian students in their schools to be ashamed of their parents’ religions.30 In a move reminiscent of the ambiguous positioning of the Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu, Jesus became one of the avatars in a Christian tract published in Calcutta (and written in Oriya) in 1837, warning the reader that the deity worshiped in the Jagannatha Temple at Puri in Orissa was a degenerate form of the true Jagannatha and exhorting the pilgrim to Puri to “remain a Hindu and also believe in Christ,” who is, by implication, the true Jagannatha.31
THE THIRD WAVE: UTILITARIANS AND ANGLICISTS AND THE REBELLION / MUTINY OF 1857
The tipping point came in 1857. The eighteenth century saw military incursions, floods, famines, epidemics, political disruptions, and bankrupt treasuries. Great land settlements displaced many landholders, and the confiscation of buildings previously rent-free for religious officials raised hackles in various quarters. The British relationship to Indians changed dramatically after 1813, degenerating into “a compound of cold utilitarian logic, cloying Christian ideology, and molten free-trade evangelism.”32 That Christian ideology made the country a tinderbox of resentment, just waiting for a flame to touch it off.
The flame, the proximate cause of the rebellion, came, in 1857, in the form of a bit of awkwardness about certain cartridges. Religious awkwardness. The British issued a new rifle, the Enfield, for which the cartridges had to be bitten open (since both hands were otherwise occupied; think of John Wayne biting off the tops of those grenades in World War II movies) to pour the powder down the rifle’s barrel. Greased cartridges had been first imported in 1853.33 The sepoys believed, possibly rightly, that these cartridges were greased with a tallow probably containing both pigs’ fat and cows’ fat (lard and suet, animal fats that were used for a lot of things in the military, and though the fat was more likely to have been mutton fat, it was still anathema to the many vegetarian Brahmins among the sepoys). The one thing that you could say for this arrangement, which would have forced Muslims to eat pork and Hindus to eat beef, is that it was equally disgusting for both groups to bite the bullet, and at least the British could not be accused of favoritism. But the animal grease was not merely disgusting; it would have been spiritually disastrous, bringing instant excommunication and damnation. (Later the British briefly entertained but finally dismissed a suggestion to allow the troops to grease the cartridges with ghee.) From early 1857, “newspapers had made known the general repugnance felt by the Sepoys to the use of the new cartridges.”34 As one contemporary British observerka wrote of the cartridge scandal, “It was so terrible a thing, that, if the most malignant enemies of the British Government had sat in conclave for years, and brought an excess of devilish ingenuity to bear upon the invention of a scheme framed with the design of alarming the Sipáhi [sepoy] mind from one end of India to the other, they could not have devised a lie better suited to the purpose.”35
The rumors fueled the suspicion that the British had done it on purpose, in order to leave the sepoys no option, if they wanted to save their souls, but conversion to Christianity. When sepoys refused to load the cartridges, they were publicly humiliated, imprisoned, or expelled.36 Although the British quickly withdrew the offending cartridges, the damage had been done, and the sepoys didn’t trust any existing cartridges.37 In the intense heat of May 9, 1857, eighty-five sepoys in Meerut were arrested for refusing to handle the cartridges. On the next night, other sepoys banded together, massacred the English residents of the town, and marched on Delhi.38 More sepoys, and more officers, joined the fight, which quickly escalated. Muslims fought on the side of the Hindus, Sikhs hostile to Muslims with the British. Innocent civilians, women and children, were routinely killed by both the British and the Indian troops.39
A small British community sought refuge from the rebellion in the local fort at Jhansi, which was ruled by a Maharashtrian queen named Lakshmi Bai, a beautiful young widow who was an accomplished horsewoman. The British refugees were massacred. Lakshmi Bai insisted that she too had been victimized by the sepoys. When a local rival to the throne invaded Jhansi, she claimed loyalty to the British, but they did nothing to help her. When the British laid siege to Jhansi, in 1858, she led her troops into battle, but Jhansi fell. She slipped out in disguise, rode away, and (with the help of a confederate) captured Gwalior. When the British attacked Gwalior, she was shot to death.40
The Jhansi massacre is one of several events that stand out amid a long catalog of deaths and horrors and thus serve as historical pegs upon which people have hung a range of myths and legends that express the emotional impact of the Rebellion. Another concerns Mangal Pandey, a sepoy of the No. 5 Company of the Thirty-fourth Native Infantry at Barrackpore, near Calcutta, who, on March 29, 1857, more than a month before the Rebellion, publicly objected to the cartridges, on religious grounds. Others joined in, all hell broke loose, and Mangal Pandey was executed by hanging on April 8. But subsequent mythologies (and a popular Bollywood film, Ketan Mehta’s Mangal Pandey, 2005, with Amir Khan as Pandey) have overlaid the events surrounding Mangal Pandey to such an extent that they have almost totally obscured what evidence there is. According to one legend, when a mounted officer rode at him, Pandey fired at him and hit the horse (the first casualty in the Rebellion), unseating the officer.41 There is also some debate about whether Pandey was under the influence of bhang,42 opium, alcohol,43 some combination of all of them, or none. (The hardship caused by a new opium tax was said to be one of the major factors that led to the Rebellion.44)
Yet another incident, somewhat better authenticated but
equally mythologized, concerns a massacre at Kanpur (or Cawnpore, as the British called it, near what was Harsha’s Kanauj) on June 27, 1857. When insurgents besieged the British there, General Wheeler accepted terms under which the British would be allowed passage by boat downriver to Allahabad. Some four hundred of the British surrendered; as they boarded boats at Sati-Chaura Ghat, a detachment of sepoys under the command of Nana Sahib, the Indian ruler of Kanpur, ambushed them, and many of them were shot down or drowned. Nana Sahib rescued about two hundred women and children and locked them up in the Bibighar (“Ladies’ House”), which was, significantly, a small bungalow where a British officer had once housed his Indian mistress. Many of the captives were suffering from dysentery and cholera.45 On July 15, troops of Nana Sahib’s adopted son attacked the Bibighar, and when the regular soldiers refused to carry out the command to execute them all (a minor rebellion of its own), four or five butchers from the local market slaughtered all who were still alive and threw the body parts down a well. Some historians argue that Nana Sahib intended to use the captives as hostages and did not issue the order for the extermination, while others believe that he panicked, fearing that the British would seize Kanpur, and gave the order. In any case, as Keay describes it, “Their slaughterhouse methods, clumsy rather than sadistic, constituted an atrocity which would haunt the British till the end of their Indian days. For sheer barbarity this ‘massacre of the innocents’ was rivaled only by the disgusting deaths devised for dozens of equally innocent Indians by way of British reprisal.”46 Though the cartridges were the proverbial straw, the camel (flanked by the cow and pig) was already heavily loaded with economic, social, and political resentments, which continued to fester.
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